"Anybody in the house tonight smokin' weed?" howled Snoop Dogg to the crowd at the half-full Upstate Concert Hall on Friday night. They were. They had been since shortly after 9 p.m., more than two hours before a sunglassed Snoop lankily meandered onstage. Despite the venue's rigorous security efforts, enough pot found its way inside that Bob Marley would have been proud — and high.

This is unsurprising, as the hip-hop artist born Calvin Broadus Jr. has long been a vocal proponent and partaker of marijuana, especially on Twitter, where he has nearly 11½ million followers. His almost daily "wake 'n' bake" selfies are among his most popular tweets.

On Friday, amid the plumes of smoke, a diverse but mostly suburban crowd reveled as Snoop Dogg (aka Snoop Lion) performed his hits, including "Next Episode," "Ain't No Fun," "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang" and "Who Am I? (What's My Name?)." Snoop smoothly rhymed his way through more than 20 tunes in a set that lasted just over 60 minutes by playing fragments rather than songs in their entirety. The set list was predominantly made up of covers of numbers on which Snoop was featured, but also included songs of artists like Katy Perry ("California Gurls"), Joan Jett ("I Love Rock 'n' Roll") and House of Pain ("Jump Around").

While Snoop is too skilled a rapper and performer to put on a bad show, there was something saddening about seeing a quadruple-platinum artist who once filled arenas reduced to playing to a few hundred in a suburban strip mall. The most affecting parts of the show were Snoop's back-to-back tributes to Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., both iconic gangsta rappers who were shot and killed, in 1996 and 1997, respectively.

While the performances were competent, that's not what made them emotional. Rather, it was the realization that Snoop Dogg is one of the few remaining original gangsta rappers who carries the torch of his splintered and dated genre, while many of his contemporaries are either dead or pursuing other forms of work.

Regardless, the Doggfather still knows how to work a crowd even if he can't command ones as large as he used to in the 1990s and early 2000s. Even after waiting for hours for his too-brief performance, through decent sets by local DJs and a mediocre effort by the rap group Lucid Dream, the Upstate Concert Hall audience sang and danced through every song, some swaying along and holding lighters high above their heads. Even a security guard was spied taking an iPhone video of one of Snoop's most famous tunes. I think Snoop would be OK with that.